If we want to improve the health of our country, we should start with our children. With the NHS under historic levels of pressure, and demographics only set to make it harder to meet these, we need to do everything we can to ensure that the next generation is as healthy as it possibly can be.

This means increasing and promoting physical activity in schools and reducing childhood obesity rates in the UK.

We know that targeted interventions aimed at increasing physical activity in schools lead to a significant fall in BMI scores among children, and that physical activity has cumulative benefits - from helping to prevent obesity in later life to an increase in GCSE scores.

We are calling for a whole systems approach to recognising the benefits and importance of physical activity in schools, with the involvement of organisations including Ofsted, The Department for Culture, Media and Sport as well as schools themselves.

Improving levels of physical activity in schools isn’t a silver bullet, and we cannot pretend that there will not be far more work to do. But, as we consider how to ensure the next generation is happier and healthier than those before it, this must be one of the tools which we seek to use.

Key recommendations

1. The New Ofsted Inspection Framework should foreground the work schools do to promote wellbeing and physical activity.

With Ofsted in the process of overhauling their report system towards more nuanced, information-rich dashboards on each school, these dashboards should prominently set out what schools are doing to promote the physical and mental wellbeing of their students – including what they are doing to promote physical activity across the school day.

2. The PE and Sports Premium should be revised to encourage a specific focus on increasing physical activity across the school day, with reducing obesity a specific target for spending

When the ringfenced funding for physical activity is focussed on PE, it is not surprising that other ways to encourage activity lose out. The Government should revise the guidance supporting the grant, to make clear that schools
can and should use this to fund a range of interventions which go beyond the narrow confines of PE lessons.

3. The Government should publish a national Youth Physical Activity strategy, setting out what is expected from both schools and other parts of the public sector

As a minimum, this strategy should make clear what the Government expects each part of the system to do. This should not be limited to the public sector, but should bring in sports governing bodies, the gym industry, and others, to create a whole systems approach to youth physical activity.